I'm surprised this sort of thing hasn't happened before. This morning, a Bankruptcy Trustee got indicted as part of an investigation into the bribery of city officials in Carson, California. The Trustee, Robert Pryce, was one who I had appeared before at creditor meetings about a half dozen times, and he always struck me as being a decent, conscientious chap, one who ran his hearings expeditiously. So far, the prosecution hasn't leaked any evidence that he did anything to harm any of the estates he administered, or did anything other than line the pockets of himself and his cronies, so even if he turns out to have been a crook, I will withhold judgment on him as a person for the time being.

One of the things he is accused of doing is diverting estate business to a real estate broker, in exchange for the broker hiring his daughter in a no-work position. That quid pro quo struck me as interesting, since one of the few bright ideas I had back when I worked for my late father, who was also a Chapter 7 Trustee, was for him to do something like that for me, sort of a wink-wink arrangement with a large bk firm downtown or Century City, in which they would get more business, and I would get an associate position. My dad, being the only person in the room that moment with integrity, politely informed me that such an arrangement would get him booted from the panel, and that if I wanted a high-paying job so badly, why didn't I study harder at law school, etc. I guess, from an ethical, legal, and technical standpoint, he was right, even if it took years of therapy for me to deal with that fact.